Disqus WordPress Plugin Confusing GoogleBot

Disqus has always been a challenged for Google but several months ago, they made their commenting rendering engine more search engine friendly - but many were not convinced.

That being said, recently, several bloggers noticed an unusual spike in 404 errors reported by Google Webmaster Tools. They dug into the issue and it seemed like it was coming from the Disqus commenting engine.

Here is a picture of the weird 404 errors that make no real logical sense (it should show URLs, not numbers):

Google's John Mueller said he'd look into it but in the meantime, the webmaster emailed Disqus support who blamed Google. They wrote:

We believe these 404 crawl errors are due to search engines like Google trying to crawl dynamic JavaScript-assembled links coded in the Disqus WordPress plugin. We’ve recommended reaching out to Google directly about this, as enough feedback may help them resolve this. In the past someone from Google has had to tweak it to get them to go away, and this looks similar to the previous case.

So hopefully, the two of them will be able to fix the issue.

I have seen an unusual spike in complaints about these errors in the past week or so.